Every low-probability, high-consequence adverse incident or catastrophic operational failure at any production or processing facility, such as a chemical plant, fluid-catalytic-cracking units (FCCU) at a petroleum refinery, or nuclear energy production plant, or even a biological facility or waste management facility, is preceded by many high-probability, low-consequence events, which are often recognized by alarms or as near-misses (Pariyani et al., Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 49:8062-8079 (2010a); Pariyani et al., 20th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE) 28:175-180 (2010b)). Temperatures may go too high, tanks may run dry, power outages may cause all sorts of problems, or perhaps lead to flooding, and the like. An ideal risk management system at the plant will account for all these near-misses, and develop leading indicators to notify the operators in advance of undesirable incidents that are likely to happen. In particular, such knowledge becomes highly desirable for unmanned plants/facilities.
For example, in the following situations, the public has been harmed by industrial accidents, adverse events, and/or catastrophic failures that could have been avoided by an optimal alarm system. For example, the US government chemical safety board web site (www.csb.gov) is inundated with reports of accidents that took place in the chemical manufacturing facilities in the recent years that cost several lives, as well as property damage. The recurring themes in the outcome of analysis of these accidents are a) the lack of preventive maintenance, and b) the lack of attention to process near-misses. Moreover, every year billions of dollars are lost in the manufacturing industry due to “trips” (unexpected shutdowns due to malfunction of the equipment and/or control systems) at operational plants and facilities. For instance, there have been $6 billion/year losses recorded by US refineries from unexpected shut downs of crude and fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) units.
An additional condition, which is frequently observed in most manufacturing or processing facilities, is silencing (muting) the alarms that are considered to be nuisance. These are alarms that are activated so often that that are considered to be of such little significance by the operators, that they are regarded as unimportant disturbances resulting from normal operations, so they are turned off or ignored like fire drills in office buildings. But such actions negate the value of the alarm system. For example, at an offshore refinery facility visited in 2011 by the inventors, most of the “low priority” alarms had been silenced. In fact, one of the reasons that the BP off shore accident in Gulf of Mexico in 2010 (where 11 people died and 17 were injured) was not identified in its early stages was because an alarm had been silenced because it had been going off in the middle of the night and awaking the workers.
Thus there is a need, not met until the present invention, for a “distributed control system” (DCS) and “emergency shutdown” (ESD) system databases and a variety of disclosed processes using an dynamic system that analyzes alarm and process data to assess operational risks as they change with time and to send alert signals and/or reports to address risk and/or alarm variables and to reduce or prevent adverse incidents or failures.